It’s not quite Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole,” but Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the decade-defining novel of 1980s excess and self-destruction, opens with one of those sentences that lingers: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”
Of course, McInerney was that kind of guy: wired on cocaine, jaw grinding, inhabiting a world of beautiful women and striving mediocrities, squeezing in some novel writing when the drugs ran out. Bright Lights isn’t a finger-wagging exemplum about dangerous indulgences. As least, I never read it that way. It probably lured more bored and ambitious young readers to crumbling early-’80s New York than any Woody Allen film, Lou Reed record, or Milton Glaser bumper sticker. (I’m not sure anyone is lured anywhere by novels these days, but defending that position requires another 2,000 bleak words, so I’ll spare you...).
Bright Lights, Big City made McInerney hugely famous (the literary celebrity is a thing of the past, too), and back then, a terrific debut inevitably became a mediocre Hollywood film, which, despite flopping, made him even more famous. Seven more novels would follow. And many marriages.
I met McInerney at the Odeon in Lower Manhattan, the restaurant immortalized on the cover of Bright Lights, where we talked about drugs, fame, models, 9/11, cancel culture, Zohran Mamdani, Raymond Carver, and the ex-girlfriend who helped destroy the presidential ambitions of a prominent Democrat.
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